Abstract

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3 or Oracle Applications consist of many software components which provide specific functionality. However, these ERP systems are designed as an all-in-one solution, often implementing functionality not needed. Furthermore, such ERP systems depend on very large-scale infrastructures like servers and networking technology, which are very expensive to install and to maintain. The new idea is to develop a novel ERP system architecture which facilitates an overall reusability of individual business components (BC) through a shared and NONmonolithic architecture based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. According to the common use of distributed applications, several security problems exist. This paper describes an open security model for a shared ERP system based on Web Service technology. The visualized approach underlines the security requirements of distributed ERP systems and gives a basic proposal for further research.